If your Mother Gave you Blogging Advice…

Published On March 25, 2011
37 Comments Leave a Comment

Mother's Advice

She would make sure you were buckled up before starting the car

When setting up a blog, what you do in the beginning can have big consequences down the road.  Pick a good quality hoster, set better passwords than ‘password’, do some research before you buy your URL, get some spam protection, secure your twitter handle and start your mailing list.  All of these things can stop you from hitting a wall and flying out the windshield.

She would tell you not to take candy from strangers

It’s tempting to snag that sweet sweet nugget of linky goodness.  When someone you don’t know emails you to ask about link exchanges or buying a link from you, it’s best to avoid jumping into their windowless van lest Google throw you in the basement with all the nasty content farmers.

She would hound you to clean up your room

If it looks like a bomb went off in your sidebars.  If you have broken links and out of bounds images.  If you still use Comic Sans even though your blog has nothing to do with comic books or heros.  If you have a tag cloud. Please, listen to your mother and tidy up a bit?

She would tell you to eat your veggies

We realize that spinach isn’t the tastiest thing to eat and yeah, it can even smell funny.  But you gotta just plug your nose and shove it down the hatch.  Why?  Because it’s good for you.  It will help you grow up big and strong.  Many bloggers think of SEO the way a 4 year old thinks of spinach.  It’s often the last thing tackled on the plate and the hardest to power through. SEO is the key to growing your blog big and strong.  You need to learn how to build those links and write those title tags.  Get to it…you’ll be at the table until bedtime if you don’t.

She would ask you if you’d jump off a bridge just because all the other bloggers were doing it.

It’s normal to want to belong and embrace this sense of community bloggers create online. But if every decision you make regarding your own blog is based on the fact that one of the ‘big guys’ is doing it then you’re going to get lost down the proverbial rabbit hole.

Put your goals together and then make decisions to meet those goals; decisions that make sense for  you.  If your only goal is to succeed then you’ll find yourself floundering around wondering what it is you need to make it big.

What does success mean to you?  Does it mean having huge traffic numbers?  Or maybe it means having a nice sized subscriber base.  If you’re thinking you want both (or one or the other) then think about why you want that.  What does a large subscriber base mean for you?  What is the ultimate end goal?  Your end goal might be hugely different from someone else’s end goal so it makes no sense to blindly follow what they are doing because they appear to be successful.  Got it? Good.  Now go eat your spinach.

Heather lives, parents and blogs in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Grab her rss feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/fFhR) for more posts on blogging from a geeky mom.

37 replies on “If your Mother Gave you Blogging Advice…”

Joshua A. Price Reply

So informative things are provided here,I really happy to read this post,I was just imagine about it and you provided me the correct information I really bookmark it,for further reading,So thanks for sharing the information.

handyfinder Reply

Love it!!! Very funny and written with a lot of wit!! 😀 Thank you for the advices and guidelines, some blogger will really need it,…

PMADESK Reply

She would ask you if you’d jump off a bridge just because all the other bloggers were doing it. LOL! ! Hey! Personal profile page of Doppler internet and PMA desk owned by Carl Doppler is an excellent way to distill information about you into a digestible and interesting format. Your profile is a scrapbook of your life in words! Visit the site and feel free to comment! =)

yasmeen Reply

good advice, not unlike those in the All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten book, but with good blogging insights. although maybe there are some other fundamental issue that is left out, such as the characteristic or main idea of the blog itself.

Garth Reply

Pretty cool post. I like the way you’ve made it. The comparison on how you make things relate each other. I love this manner.

Pe Reply

“When someone you don’t know emails you to ask about link exchanges or buying a link from you, it’s best to avoid jumping into their windowless van lest Google throw you in the basement with all the nasty content farmers. ”

ohhh, that’s exactly what this post is. And the whole blog too for that case (see sidebar)

Kathleen B. Reply

Amazing post Heather! You put it into such a great context that it is very easy to see why each of those things are important. If I could go back, I certainly would have started out on WordPress instead of being faced with making the switch now.

Tammy Reply

I love the Clean Up Your Room one. When I first started blogging, my sidebars were a big issue. I had so much “junk”. Now, I keep it simple. It’s easier to keep up with broken links, and my readers can focus on my content without getting dizzy looking at a bunch of other site buttons.

Marianna Reply

Another great post Heather! Very helpful.
I am staring to finally grasp SEO after 2 years of blogging. My problem is that I am on Blogger which has very limited SEO capabilities. And no, I’m not moving. I’m stubborn. So I am trying hard to figure out the best way to SEO with it.

Alison Reply

CRAP! I guess I better go take my tag cloud out… it’s in the footer though.. does that make it better? LOL

Great post Heather!

Heather Reply

in the footer is better – as long as there isn’t something else that could be in that spot. I don’t think anyone really uses them, so it’s a shame to have them taking up space.

Adam W. Warner Reply

Great advice for both beginner and experienced bloggers. I couldn’t agree more with the SEO part above. If you don’t learn the basic SEO techniques, you’re going to be working much harder than necessary to get ranked. It used to be a bit of a mystery to me…I knew little pieces of what I should be doing but couldn’t put them together in my head until we found a great tool named Scribe SEO

We wrote about and how it helped us. The link is in my signature above. It puts all the basics in front of you and then analyzes your articles to tell you what is wrong and how to fix it. We’re in love with it;)

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Thanks for the good advice! I am just now learning to seo after 6 years of blogging. I wish I had learned it long ago.

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